Meta’s streak of hiring high-profile executives from Apple’s AI team continues, with the company reportedly poaching Ke Yang, who had only recently been appointed to lead Apple’s rumored ChatGPT-like search project. Here are the details.
Apple’s brain drain continues
In recent months, Apple has lost several machine learning researchers and executives to AI rivals, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and, notably, Meta, which has been on a hiring spree across Silicon Valley.
That includes Jian Zhang, Apple’s former Lead AI Researcher for Robotics; Ruoming Pang, who led Apple’s foundation models team; and Frank Chu, who reportedly oversaw Apple AI’s work on cloud infrastructure, training, and search, just a few of the names who have recently defected to Menlo Park.
Soon, they will be joined by another ex-colleague, as reported by Bloomberg:
“The executive, Ke Yang, is leaving for Meta Platforms Inc., according to people with knowledge of the matter. Just weeks ago, he was appointed head of a team called Answers, Knowledge and Information, or AKI. The group is developing features to make the Siri voice assistant more ChatGPT-like by adding the ability to pull information from the web.”
The AKI group was formed earlier this year, and had reportedly been “exploring a number of in-house AI services with the goal of creating a new ChatGPT-like search experience.”
Yang had recently been put in charge of the entire AKI team, rather than just the Answers feature, following an internal shake-up that led to the departure of Robby Walker.
Walker had been leading the much-troubled Siri revamp and had more recently been put in charge of the AKI group. Just last month, Bloomberg reported that he would leave the company, which is when Apple appointed Yang to take over the team.
With Yang’s departure to Meta, it’s unclear who will now lead the AKI group. Yang had been reporting directly to John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of AI, whom the company has reportedly been looking to replace.
Giannandrea’s role in Apple’s AI efforts has been significantly reduced over the past year, following the company’s missteps with the delayed and heavily staggered rollout of Apple Intelligence features, including the revamped Siri that is reportedly planned (but increasingly less likely) to be launched next March.
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